Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy – serie

Even though several branches of philosophy meet in the notion of trust, it has nevertheless been largely neglected by mainstream philosophy. Arguably, most existing analyses fail to give a just account of the reality of human experience. The author of this study believes that this is not a coincidence, but symptomatic of the irrelevance of received ideas of rationality for crucial areas of human agency. "Individualist" approaches, he argues, can be accused precisely of ignoring fundamental questions about the nature of the individual. Expanding on the works of Wittgenstein, Winch, and others, the author demonstrates the conceptual significance of our dependence on others. The discussion stretches over philosophical psychology, epistemology, political philosophy and moral philosophy. The book may be of interest to those interested in philosophy, psychology or the social sciences.

The basic idea of reflective equilibrium, as a method for theory construction and decision-making in ethics, is that we should bring together a broad variety of moral and non-moral beliefs and, through a process of critical scrutiny and mutual adjustment, combine these into one coherent belief system. This book aims to explore systematically the promises and problems of reflective equilibrium. Part One discusses the various elements that may be involved in reflective equilibrium processes, such as principles, facts, considered judgements, background theories and ideals. Part Two is devoted to the role of fundamental views of life and religion. Part Three discusses methodological issues such as coherentism, warrant and the development of judgmental faculties by the moral inquirer. In Part Four, some alternative purposes for reflective equilibrium methods are suggested. The book closes with a number of case studies in bioethics. This book is dedicated to Robert Heeger, Professor of Ethics at Utrecht University on the occasion of his 60th birthday. He and his research group have been doing research on reflective equilibrium for many years.Twenty Dutch and Swedish colleagues have contributed to this book in his honour, which aims to be a systematic and coherent discussion of this theme.

Jeffrie G. Murphy's third collection of essays further pursues the topics of punishment and retribution that were explored in his two previous collections: "Retribution, Justice and Therapy" and "Retribution Reconsidered". Murphy now explores these topics in the light of reflections on issues that are normally associated with religion: forgiveness, mercy, and repentance. He also explores the general issue of theory and practice and discusses a variety of topics in applied ethics - for example, freedom of artistic expression, the morality of gambling, and the value of forgiveness in psychological counselling. As always, his perspective may be described as Kantian; and, indeed, this collection contains the first extended piece of Kant scholarship that he has done in years: a long essay on Kant on theory and practice.

What, ultimately, is there good reason to do? Proposing a unified theory of agent-dependent reasons and agent-independent reasons, this work holds that principles which assign reasons to agents are valid if and only if they make maximally good sense in the light of relevant data and background theories. The theory avoids problems encountered by views associated with Nagel, Parfit, Brandt, Hubin, Gert, Baier, and Tiberius, amongst others. By what criteria should a normative theory of ultimate reasons be judged? Plausible meta-level criteria emerge from a process of identifying the criteria that have been used, sometimes unwittingly, by various theorists; categorizing and evaluating the criteria in the light of each other; and proposing revisions on that basis. This method escapes the drawbacks of rival approaches, such as those associated with Parfit, Gert, and Darwall. The resulting criteria cast a favourable light on the proposed normative theory of ultimate reasons.

The outstanding features of this book are that it directly confronts the challenge posed by G.E.M. Anscombe in Modern Moral Philosophy of how moral philosophy can be done, it makes a significant contribution to the debate on virtue theory and anti-theory in ethics, and it shows the relevance of such theoretical discussion by grounding it in, and applying it to, contemporary moral issues such as abortion, suicide, and the moral status of animals. No other book currently available covers this ground. The book is aimed primarily at upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and faculty in philosophy, but it should be accessible to anyone with an interest in practical ethics or the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

According to the neutrality thesis, in designing state policies governments should not allow themselves to be informed by any particular conceptions of the good life. The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate about this thesis in two specific ways. Firstly, the limits of acceptable state perfectionism are examined, not on a general level but by reference to some particular concerns of government policy: transgenic animals; future generations; the promotion of the arts; minority cultures; the allocation of scarce health care resources; the integration of mentally handicapped people into the community; and the expression of national identities. Secondly, the book as a whole evaluates the argument that the government has a special task to produce or to maintain intrinsically collective aspects of the good life, because these are to be seen as public goods.

What are the conditions which must be met for a person to be justly held responsible for his or her moral faults and failures? This text pays systematic attention to ontological issues impinging on this question. It contains a selection of the papers discussed at the International Confererence on Moral Responsibility and Ontology held at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In Part I the stage is set by the keynote speakers of the conference, Peter van Inwagen and R. Jay Wallace. Subsequent parts are devoted to responsiblity and personal identity, incompatibilist arguments, compatibilist positions, and some related subjects.

The papers collected here represent the problem of imperceptible harms and benefits. This problem is better characterized as a series of both practical and technical paradoxes, since those who deny the existence of imperceptible decrements (or increments) face problems no less perplexing than those who affirm their existence. The puzzles and paradoxes combine very practical and pressing worries about our obligations to relieve starvation, mitigate suffering and conserve resources, with deep metaethical worries about the nature of practical rationality and dynamic choice. This collection gathers together the work of moral philosophers, decision theorists, and economic theorists in an attempt to display the dimensions of the problem and to advance alternative solutions.

This text defends moral cognitivism with a new approach. The author maintains that the truth of moral judgments is determined in fundamentally the same way as is the truth of non-moral judgments, in other words by appeal to truth conditions which are incorporated in beliefs held in common by a wide variety of societies. She argues that if a moral theory can be developed which can account for widely held, well-established moral beliefs, this would provide a set of truth conditions for moral judgments. A theory designed to do this - and through which major moral disagreements can be resolved - is presented here, together with discussions of many actual and possible objections. The book is intended for professional philosophers and advanced students of philosophy.

This volume is the result of an interdisciplinary exchange between philosophers of identity, moral philosophers, philosophers of education, moral psychologists, and post-modern deconstructivists on the subject of personal and moral identity. The contributions to the first part of the book reflect on the implications of discussions in philosophy of identity for moral theory and the view of moral identity. In the second part the focus shifts to the philosophical and psychological perspectives on the concepts of self, personal and moral identity and their interrelation. It is argued that both perspectives are needed for giving an account of the emergence of moral identity as part of someone's development into a mature person. The contributions to the third part absorb the criticism of (de)constructivist theories on essentialist conceptions of personal and social identity. This book will be of interest for philosophers and psychologists active in research on identity, self, (moral) development, and related areas.

The Emotive Theory was theory ahead of its time, and a theory which was, perhaps understandably, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and ridiculed by its critics from the outset. In Emotion, Truth and Meaning, Dr Wilks not only acquaints the reader with what the original emotivists actually claimed (and clarifies what they actually meant when they made some of the more controversial claims), he enriches their claims by psychologically expanding them. Like its predecessor, Dr Wilks's enriched emotive theory distinguishes between moral conflicts which are rationally resolvable and moral conflicts which are not, but, unlike its predecessor, it traces the irresolvability of the latter to the psychological fact that they are merely symptomatic of more fundamental conflict at the level of world view - the level where questions about the meaning of life are answered, and where the truth of the answers arrived at is emotionally-felt rather than empirically-sensed.

Patient autonomy is a much discussed and debated subject in medical ethics, as well as in healthcare practice, medical law, and healthcare policy. This book provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of both the concept of autonomy and the principle of respect for autonomy, in an accessible style. A main feature of the title is that it combines empirical research into hospital practice with thorough philosophical analyses. As such, it is an example of a new movement in applied ethics, that of "empirical ethics". The key themes are informed consent and medical decision making, personal well-being, competence, paternalism and decision making for incompetent patients. Much attention is also devoted to autonomy in non-decision making situations - patient control over small everyday aspects of care, authenticity and existential aspects of illness, autonomy and the "ethic of care", and the relationship between autonomy and trust in the physician-patient relationship.

Ethics seeks answers to questions about the moral status of human actions and human lives. Actions and lives are temporal things. Thus, one would think that answers to ethical questions should take some account of their temporal features. And yet, while a number of authors have drawn attention to the relationship between time and ethics (Derek Parfit and Thomas Nagel in particular), there has never been a systematic study of the impact of temporal considerations on ethical issues. The essays in this collection raise and investigate some of the key issues that arise at the intersection between these two areas of philosophy.

Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in this volume. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the cardinal problem of modern population ethics, known as 'The Repugnant Conclusion'.This book is a must for (moral) philosophers with an interest in population ethics.

The philosophical discussion of state punishment is well on in years. In contrast with a large number of ethical problems which are concerned with right and wrong in relation to a narrowly specified area of human life and practice and which hav- at least since the early 70’s - been regarded as a legitimate part of philosophical thinking constituting the area of applied ethics, reflections on punishment can be traced much further back in the history of western philosophy. This is not surprising. That the stately mandated infliction of death, suffering, or deprivation on citizens should be met with hesitation - from which ethical reflections may depar- seems obvious. Such a practice certainly calls for some persuasive justification. It is therefore natural that reflective minds have for a long time devoted attention to punishment and that the question of how a penal system can be justified has constituted the central question in philosophical discussion. Though it would certainly be an exaggeration to claim that the justification question is the only aspect of punishment with which philosophers have been concerned, there has in most periods been a clear tendency to regard this as the cardinal issue. Comparatively much less attention has been devoted to the more precise questions of how, and how much, criminals should be punished for their respective wrong-doings. This may, of course, be due to several reasons.

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value brings together for the first time many of the most important and influential writings on the topic of intrinsic value to have appeared in the last half-century. During this period, inquiry into the nature of intrinsic value has intensified to such an extent that at the moment it is one of the hottest topics in the field of theoretical ethics. The contributions to this volume have been selected in such a way that all of the fundamental questions concerning the nature of intrinsic value are treated in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. These questions include how to understand the concept of intrinsic value, what sorts of things can have intrinsic value, and how to compute intrinsic value. The editors have added an introduction that ties these questions together and places the contributions in context, and they have also provided an extensive bibliography. The result is a comprehensive, balanced, and detailed picture of current thinking about intrinsic value, one that provides an indispensable backdrop against which future writings on the topic may be assessed.

This book is an exploration of what it takes for an event to count as an action. I first became interested in this topic nearly a decade ago while working on a different topic. I kept coming across philosophers making claims about the nature of action that seemed false or at least dubious to me. As a consequence I turned to the philosophy of action directly, to get to the heart of the matter. I have wrestled with this territory ever since. I hope that, with this book, I have finally earned the intuitions that put me at odds with the philosophers I was originally reading. This book develops ideas in Part Two of my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I loved being at Queen’s, for both professional and personal reasons. My thanks go to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support as a doctoral candidate. Steve Leighton and Ronald de Sousa were readers for my dissertation. They provided some early and invaluable challenges to the ideas developed here. My deepest debt of gratitude is owed to David Bakhurst, my supervisor. I learned a lot from David; this book would not be the same without his help.

Responsibility and Punishment, Third Edition presents a clear-headed defense of retributivism against several long-standing criticisms. In the end, a viable version of retributivism emerges as one which withstands more criticism than competing theories of responsibility and punishment. Extending the problem of wrong doing to collectives and compensation, Corlett explores the matter of reparations for past wrongs in the case of the crimes committed against Native Americans by the United States Government. No other philosophical work on responsibility and punishment exhibits this breadth of scope, as it delves deeply into particular concerns with retributivism, responsibility, and certain areas of compensation. Academicians and professionals in ethics, moral, social, political, and legal philosophy are likely to benefit from this analytical treatment of responsibility and punishment.

SÉVERINE DENEULIN, MATHIAS NEBEL AND NICHOLAS SAGOVSKY TRANSFORMING UNJUST STRUCTURES The Capability Approach THE CAPABILITY APPROACH Structural injustice has traditionally been the concern of two major academic disciplines: economics and philosophy. The dominant model of economics has long been that of neo-classical economics. For neo-classical economists, human we- being is to be assessed by the availability of disposable income or according to goods consumed; it is measured by the levels of utility achieved in the consumption of commodities. Social order is fashioned by the ways consumers maximise their 1 well-being and enterprises maximise their profits. A core assumption is that all 2 commodities are commensurable: they can all be measured according to a single 3 numerical covering value, which is their price. Within this neo-classical paradigm, justice is achieved when the utility level of someone cannot be increased without 4 another person seeing his or her utility level decrease. The dominant paradigm of neo-classical economics was strongly challenged when development and welfare economist Amartya Sen received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His work offered an alternative to the neo-classical evaluation of human well-being in the utility/commodity space. The underlining philosophical intuition behind Sen’s work is that the standard of living lies in the living and not in the consumption of commodities. In searching for an alternative measure of human well-being, Sen devised his capability approach.

Freedom of the sort implicated in acting freely or with free will is important to the truth of different sorts of moral judgment, such as judgments of moral responsibility and those of moral obligation. Little thought, however, has been invested into whether appraisals of good or evil presuppose free will. This important topic has not commanded the attention it deserves owing to what is perhaps a prevalent assumption that freedom leaves judgments concerning good and evil largely unaffected. The central aim of this book is to dispute this assumption by arguing for the relevance of free will to the truth of two sorts of such judgment: welfare-ranking judgments or judgments of personal well-being (when is one's life intrinsically good for the one who lives it?), and world-ranking judgments (when is a possible world intrinsically better than another?). The book also examines free will’s impact on the truth of such judgments for central issues in moral obligation and in the free will debate. This book should be of interest to those working on intrinsic value, personal well-being, moral obligation, and free will.

Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust , like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the ‘never again’ situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world , hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of ‘never again’. It is dedicated to all the victims – living and dead – of what Levinas calls the ‘sober, Cain-like coldness’ at the root of all crime against humanity , as much as every singular crime against another human being .

Responsibility and Punishment, Third Edition presents a clear-headed defense of retributivism against several long-standing criticisms. In the end, a viable version of retributivism emerges as one which withstands more criticism than competing theories of responsibility and punishment. Extending the problem of wrong doing to collectives and compensation, Corlett explores the matter of reparations for past wrongs in the case of the crimes committed against Native Americans by the United States Government. No other philosophical work on responsibility and punishment exhibits this breadth of scope, as it delves deeply into particular concerns with retributivism, responsibility, and certain areas of compensation. Academicians and professionals in ethics, moral, social, political, and legal philosophy are likely to benefit from this analytical treatment of responsibility and punishment.

This book provides new perspectives on endurance sport and how it contributes to a  good and sustainable life in times of climate change, ecological disruption and inconvenient truths. It builds on a continental philosophical tradition, i.e. the philosophy of among others Peter Sloterdijk,  but also on “ecosophy” and American pragmatism to explore the idea of sport as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Since ancient times, human beings have been involved in practices of the Self in order to work on themselves and improve themselves, for instance by strengthening their physical condition and performance through sport. In the contemporary world, millions of individuals engage in endurance sports such as running, swimming and cycling, to get or keep themselves in shape. This study focuses on the ethical dimension of long-distance sport, notably cycling, as a way to become better citizens, but also to contribute to a more sustainable society and healthier planet. Dominant world-views are challenged and an alternative vision is presented. Discourse analysis and conceptual analysis are combined with phenomenology and self-observations of a dedicated practitioner of endurance sport. This book is a great source for philosophers, sport philosophers, environmental philosophers, sport scientists,  policy makers, sport journalists, and endurance sport practitioners.

The discussion of physics in relation to the abstract and the concrete, the life sciences in relation to concepts of life in relation tonew and emerging biotechnology, and the neurosciences in relation to the dual nature of human identity, focuses on one main topic: time.

The discussion of physics in relation to the abstract and the concrete, the life sciences in relation to concepts of life in relation tonew and emerging biotechnology, and the neurosciences in relation to the dual nature of human identity, focuses on one main topic: time.

Many argue that our social condition resists any account of those bonds that fails to acknowledge the perspectives of the second and the third person.The first part of the book explores these themes from a historical perspective in the tradition of transcendental philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger);

Many argue that our social condition resists any account of those bonds that fails to acknowledge the perspectives of the second and the third person.The first part of the book explores these themes from a historical perspective in the tradition of transcendental philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger);

Employing the methodology of Social Labs, the book analyses responsible R&I from an experience-based viewpoint and further explores the application of responsible R&I beyond scholarly and industrial interests.

Employing the methodology of Social Labs, the book analyses responsible R&I from an experience-based viewpoint and further explores the application of responsible R&I beyond scholarly and industrial interests.